Investigations on the Move: Exploring the SAS Visual Investigator Mobile App

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In this post, we'll discuss the basics of using Mobile Investigator. We'll begin with a brief overview of Mobile Investigator and its features, then finish with an overview of the steps required to obtain and configure Mobile Investigator.

Visual Investigator is a versatile and powerful solution that can be customized for a variety of industries. Mobile Investigator is a native mobile application and powerful extension of Visual Investigator that allows investigators and analysts to interact with their environment in the field, with or without an internet connection.

Use Mobile Investigator

Mobile Investigator is a mobile application that serves as an extension of your Visual Investigator environment. Users can create cases, upload documentation to existing cases, search entity records, and more, all using their mobile devices.

For example, a fraud investigator could search for and look at the information for a claim entity in the field, and upload images.

Users of Mobile Investigator can leverage their device's capabilities to enhance the investigation: for example, using the device's camera and GPS location information to document the investigation, add metadata, and filter information by relevancy using location.

Since Mobile Investigator is a native mobile app, some functions are available even if the user does not have an internet connection. For example, if it is enabled by the administrator, users can create and save draft objects. Once connection to the server is re-established, these objects become available in Visual Investigator.

New features added with each Visual Investigator release have extended the application's capabilities even further. For example, the January release of Visual Investigator extended the offline capabilities of Mobile Investigator so that users can add attachments to objects.

Deploy Mobile Investigator

Mobile Investigator is included with all licenses for Visual Investigator on versions 2022.09 and later. It is also available, but licensed separately, for earlier versions of Visual Investigator.

The server-side components of Mobile Investigator are installed during Visual Investigator deployment and configuration. Additional steps are required to obtain the mobile application and configure the environment to receive mobile traffic.

Mobile Investigator can be downloaded from the Visual Investigator server and uncompressed and installed according to your device or organization's security policies. Different versions are available for Android and Apple Devices as shown in the table below.  For more information on installing and managing the application in your organization and connecting to your server, see the administrator documentation.

Android	*sas-server*/SASMobileInvestigator/resources/android
Apple	*sas-server*/SASMobileInvestigator/resources/ios

The first step is to make sure your Visual Investigator environment can accept traffic from different types of mobile devices. This requires configuring the CORS settings in Environment Manager. The specific settings you'll need to configure depend on your environment and what version of Viya you have.

For example, if you are using version 2023 or later, you'll need to configure the definition of several services. This facilitates ingress of network traffic from apple or Android devices, including Visual Investigator Data Hub, Files, and SAS Mobile Investigator. For earlier versions of Visual Investigator, you must also configure the definitions for the Folders, Identities, and SAS Logon Manager services.

 Configuring the allowedOrigins field to enable Apple Mobile Investigator Users. 

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

Depending on whether your users will be using the iOS or Android version of the application, administrators must change the allowedOrigins field accordingly. See the table for the appropriate value of the allowedOrigins field. See the above image for an example of the Mobile Investigator service with the appropriate allowedOrigins value for iOS traffic.

Android only	https://localhost
Apple only	ionic://localhost
Both	https://localhost, ionic://localhost

See the Administrator's Guide for specific details on how to configure these settings in your Visual Investigator environment.

Customize Mobile Investigator

To customize the mobile user experience and configure its user interface, you'll need to set up user and entity permissions for mobile access and configure the mobile user interface.

In the Manage Investigate and Search interface  sure any groups or users that will use the mobile app have the capability Access Mobile Investigator. This will enable the users to sign in on the mobile app.

 the Access SAS Mobile Investigator permission and groups that have it Under Permissions in the Manage Investigate and Search Interface. 

Next, you must configure a homepage, and mobile versions of the entity page templates for each type of entity you would like mobile users to interact with.

In the Mobile section of the Pages tab, you can create and configure these pages. The mobile page template and controls are variations on their desktop counterpart, and are optimized for small screens. For example, compare a desktop page template map control, and a mobile page template map control below. The latter allows you to use the location data of the mobile device to enable features like automatically focusing the map on the user's location, or routing directions to a particular case.

 A Desktop Page template map control (left) compared with a Mobile Page template map control (right).

Finally, an administrator can enable the offline creation of objects if desired. Entities have offline creation disabled by default.

For example, if you would like a user to be able to create a new Investigation entity, you must edit the entity Settings tab.

the Details section of an Entity settings page with the option to enable offline creation selected. 

This is just a glimpse of the features and functionality of SAS Mobile Investigator and SAS Visual Investigator. For more information on configuring and using Visual and Mobile Investigator, see the Visual Investigator Administrator's Guide and User's Guide.

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